Another Piece On That Thing I Said I Wouldn't Write About

I finally saw The Da Vinci Code movie, and guess what? It's not bad. It's no classic, and outside Ian McKellen's Sir Leigh Teabing, none of the characters are much (just like the novel). But it's a perfectly respectable version of a best-selling book.

If anything, it's better than the novel. Dan Brown presents lunatic ideas fairly uncritically, whereas in the movie, whenever McKellen makes an outrageous claim, Tom Hanks (who's likeable even in a nothing part) is around to be skeptical.

Its biggest flaw as far as being a crowd-pleaser is that about two hours in--which is long enough for any movie--the bad guys are caught so the tension level goes way down. Yet you've still got half an hour more to go.

I can see why Ron Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman did it this way. When you've got a novel with 50 millions readers, if you make too many changes, they won't be happy. Still, there are certain things you can do in a novel that don't play in a movie.

Whatever they did, it worked. The opening was huge and the audience seems to be satisfied. They may not win any awards, but everyone involved already has plenty.